Peace activists are holding anti-war protests across the country, calling on the government to end Canada's combat operations in Afghanistan.
Only a small crowd gathered at a demonstration in Fredericton, N.B. under heavy rain clouds, but organizers said their message was important.
"I'm happy with the turn out," Matthew Abbott of the Fredericton Peace Coalition told CTV Atlantic.
"We can see there are a number of people in Fredericton willing to brave the bad weather to show their opinion about what's happening in Afghanistan, despite the climate that isn't very friendly to dissent."
In Montreal, hundreds of people attended a peace march in equally rainy weather, many of them carrying colourful banners and chanting anti-war slogans.
Mary Walsh, an activist with the Raging Grannies, said she was concerned by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's comments that the mission should be extended to 2011 -- two years beyond the current completion date of February 2009.
"This is why we're here today, because 2009 is bad enough but 2011 just isn't going to go down well with the Canadian public," she told CTV Montreal.
Another march in Toronto had more than 300 attendants and began at the U.S. Consulate.
The rallies came the same day as Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited CFB Valcartier in Quebec, and met with the spouses of soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
"Our troops get the strength they need for the hard, dangerous work we ask them to do from the support they get back home," he said.
Michael Skinner, a Toronto academic and anti-war activist, said NATO and Canadian actions in Afghanistan are building resistance rather than the peace.
He told 麻豆影视net on Saturday that he travelled to Afghanistan this summer with an Afghan-Canadian colleague to make a documentary film.
"Certainly the reason I went to Afghanistan is that I'm quite skeptical of the claims of the government," said Skinner, who is a PhD candidate at York University.
"We're involved in a counter-insurgency war that's very similar to what occurred in Vietnam and Central America."
Skinner, a researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies, said he visited four provinces. He found Afghans to be skeptical about the role of foreign troops in Afghanistan and that they saw very little progress in reconstruction.
"Up to this point, thousands of Afghans have been killed. We really have no idea how many have been injured, how many people have been made homeless or become refugees and how many people are arbitrarily arrested or detained," he said.
"All of these things are creating resistance rather than support," he said.
The Afghanistan situation is undermining the United Nations' traditional peacekeeping role, he said.
Public opinion polling has found that most Canadians oppose Canada's military role in Afghanistan.
The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois would like to see Canada's combat role end after 2009, while NDP Leader Jack Layton wants Canada's military operations to end now.
John Holmes, the UN's undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, has said recently that Canada is making a difference on the ground in Afghanistan and that it should maintain its commitment there.
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has asked foreign troops to stay, but he has also expressed frustration at the number of civilian deaths as a result of NATO and U.S. clashes with the Taliban.
With a report by CTV's Genevieve Beauchemin in Quebec City
